


Let the Tea Leaves Fall

by starfishstar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Banter, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Marauders, Marauders era, Seventh year at Hogwarts, and of course Remus and Sirius subtly flirting and figuring out their feelings for each other, divination is what you make of it, finding joy in the present despite what’s to come, reading portents in tea leaves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21902497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfishstar/pseuds/starfishstar
Summary: Sirius frowned down at the teacups. “There are so many other things I could be doing with my time. Are we taking this seriously, really?”Or: the Marauders practise reading tea leaves in preparation for a Divination exam, and see more than they bargained for.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 10
Kudos: 121
Collections: RS Small Gifts 2019





	Let the Tea Leaves Fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coyotesuspect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coyotesuspect/gifts).



> For coyotesuspect in the 2019 Remus/Sirius Small Gifts fest, for your prompt #2: “tea leaves ain’t shit” ;-)
> 
> (No, I don’t actually think any of the Marauders would have taken Divination to N.E.W.T level. But let’s roll with it…?)
> 
> Thank you to Small Gifts beta extraordinaire liseuse! And thank you to my friend A. who came up with a fitting idea when I was trying to figure out what to see in Remus’ teacup.

“All right,” Lily said. “Let’s do this thing.”  
  
They were all assembled – Remus, Sirius, James, Lily and Peter – at the far end of one of the long Gryffindor tables in the Great Hall, late enough into the evening that most other students had finished their meals and wandered back to their common rooms. Or, in the case of a brave few, ventured out into the thickly falling snow now muffling the castle grounds under its spell.  
  
Sirius frowned down at the teacups on the table. “There are so many other things I could be doing with my time. Are we taking this seriously, really?”  
  
He could be outside flying drills in the snow with James; he could be in the common room happily needling Remus whilst he attempted to do his Astronomy assignment – he could be doing so many things, really.  
  
“ _I’m_ taking it seriously,” Peter shot back from across the table. “I’m taking it quite seriously that I want to pass my Divination N.E.W.T., thank you. And since only about a quarter of what Trelawney says ever makes sense, I for one think we need the extra practice.”  
  
“Really the question is, why did any of us agree to take Divination N.E.W.T.s in the first place?” James mused, from where he slouched comfortably on the bench, his knee just barely touching Lily’s.  
  
“Because of the Great Blood Oath we all swore five years ago,” Remus said, and he said it so seriously that Lily stared at him for several seconds before she realised he was joking. Then she hit him on the arm.  
  
“Ow,” Remus said, but conversationally, not as if he really meant it.  
  
“Right,” Lily said. “Drink your tea, you lot.”  
  
They drank their tea.  
  
When all the teacups had been emptied down to the dregs, they set them on the tabletop once again. Sirius stared down at his.  
  
“Apparently my future holds tea leaves,” he said, and Remus smirked.  
  
“Don’t forget to swirl it,” Peter said. “Trelawney always says the leaves need some help to settle.”  
  
“And turn the cup upside down,” Lily said, “until the leaves have dried a bit.”  
  
They all dutifully swirled the cups the requisite number of times, then turned them upside down and waited for the leaves to dry. Around them was the clattering of dishes against tables and the scraping of chair legs against the floor, as more students left the Great Hall. The enchanted ceiling was a muted grey, reflecting the heavy snow clouds outside. Sirius couldn’t decide if the low-hanging sky felt ominous or comforting.  
  
“D’you think Trelawney would fail me if I just wrote ‘Reply hazy, try again’ on every single question?” James asked. One of Lily’s Muggleborn roommates had brought a Magic 8-Ball back from the winter holidays, and James had been obsessed with it ever since.  
  
“ _Yes_ ,” Lily said. “Also, it’s not Trelawney marking the exam, it’s someone from the Ministry. Someone who probably, er, actually knows things. Also, it’s a practical, not a written exam. Also, James Potter, what if for once the tea leaves _did_ show a portent? Wouldn’t you feel silly if you missed it because you were too busy finding ways to be cheeky in your exams?”  
  
“Not any sillier than I feel about sitting here staring at a teacup,” James muttered. But he nudged Lily cheerfully, and she nudged him cheerfully back.  
  
Remus tapped his fingers lightly on the bottom of his upturned cup. Remus had such long, elegant, capable fingers. Sirius stared, then caught himself staring, then quickly said, “Right, so, are these tea leaves dry enough yet or what?”  
  
James shot him a glance; Sirius wasn’t sure what the glance meant. Maybe it meant James saw through him entirely. Probably it meant that. Damn having best mates who knew you too well. Sirius cleared his throat.  
  
“Turn them over on the count of three?” Peter asked.  
  
James nodded, so they all turned their cups over on Peter’s count.  
  
“Want to lead us off on leaf interpretation, Moony?” James asked.  
  
Remus made a face. “I’m not sure I’m creative enough to find Trelawney-worthy portents in a teacup.”  
  
“Not creative enough?” James retorted. “Says the man who instigated the Great Christmas Prank War of 1977!”  
  
Remus laughed. Sirius caught his eye and the two of them shared an enjoyable moment of remembering what James had looked like at the breakfast table one memorable morning, with antlers Permanently Stuck to his head.  
  
Lily peered into her own teacup. “Is it…is that maybe a bird?” She sounded doubtful, so James leaned in to study it as well.  
  
“It could be an owl,” he suggested. “Those sort of tufty things there? Like two ears?”  
  
“That could a good thing,” Peter said. “Owls bring the post, so maybe an owl means good news is coming?”  
  
“Or it means death is coming,” Sirius said, then wished he hadn’t done. Because now he was picturing the heavy leather-bound books in his father’s library, tomes that listed portents and dark omens. Also, the others were now all looking at him with varying degrees of eyebrows raised. Sirius hurried on, “Come on, you’ve read the books on symbolism. Is there anything that _isn’t_ considered a symbol of death by somebody somewhere?”  
  
“Look it up in the book, Lily,” Remus suggested, which at least turned most of their eyes away from Sirius and towards the copy of _Interpreting Images, Solving Symbols and Deciphering Divination: the Nastily Exhausting Level_ that lay on the table by Lily’s elbow.  
  
Remus, though, cast a little look at Sirius, like he saw through to the uncomfortable feelings he was trying to hide: all of the confusion that was growing up Sirius Black, with the first half of his life immersed in his parents’ grim world and the second half exploding out into the utterly opposite world of his friends. Remus’ leg pressed warmly against Sirius’ and it didn’t seem like an accident.  
  
Lily, having found the relevant page, said, “Yeah, owls can mean death. Or also wisdom. Well, that’s terribly helpful.”  
  
Peter was already looking into James’ teacup. “Is this a bird too? Do we all have birds?”  
  
James picked up his cup and tilted it back and forth, trying to catch the light. “It kind of looks like a raven,” he said, but he sounded dubious about it.  
  
Lily, flipping through the book again, said, “A raven… If it’s on the left, it’s auspicious, but if it’s on the right, it’s inauspicious. Which side is it on?”  
  
“I mean,” James said, still tilting the cup to the light. “It’s a teacup. It’s _round_.”  
  
“Okay, thank you, genius,” Lily said. “Which side was it on when you first picked up the cup?”  
  
James frowned, trying to remember. “The right? I think?”  
  
“Hm,” Lily said.  
  
“At least you’ve got a matching set!” Sirius said, trying to lift the perceptibly darkening mood around the table. “A bird for a bird. How sickeningly sweet. What’s next, matching Patronuses?”  
  
Lily blushed. James looked down and scuffled his feet on the floor.  
  
“Oh, for Merlin’s sake!” Sirius said. “No, don’t even – don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know.”  
  
Peter guffawed, loudly and gleefully.  
  
“What about you, Wormtail?” James demanded, looking a little red in the face himself. “What does your teacup say about your future?”  
  
Peter picked up his cup, cradled it in both hands and squinted down at the leaves stuck inside. “Sort of a…jagged thing? A kind of…long part and then a sharp edge?”  
  
“A knife?” Lily asked, already flipping pages. She reached the right place in the book and scanned the page. “Oh. ‘The knife can represent separation, division, anger, jealousy and betrayal.’ _That’s_ cheerful.”  
  
Peter looked a little pale. “I don’t want any of that,” he muttered. “Can I have a new teacup?”  
  
Sirius tugged the book from Lily’s hands. “A knife can also be about duality, doesn’t it say that here? That it has both the caring side and the tormenting side? Or it can also just represent experiencing some kind of injustice.”  
  
“Sirius,” Remus said. “Four and a half years of Divination class, and you’re only now revealing this secret expertise in symbolism?” The look he was giving Sirius was appraising, and maybe also kind of impressed. Sirius felt very warm all of a sudden.  
  
“Just stuff I grew up hearing about,” he mumbled. “It never seemed relevant in class, since everything Trelawney says is such rot anyway.”  
  
“Come on, Padfoot, let’s see yours,” James urged. Sirius tipped his cup so the others could look into it.  
  
“It’s a Grim!” Peter yelped.  
  
“It’s _not_ a Grim,” Lily said.  
  
“If anything, it’s Padfoot himself,” James put in. “Maybe that means you’re going to spend years of your future living in your animal form.” He shot Sirius a grin. “That’d be fun. Just don’t give me fleas, okay?”  
  
“Oh, because the flea jokes haven’t got old at all in the last two years,” Sirius retorted.  
  
“A classic never gets old,” James insisted, a statement Sirius didn’t even dignify with a response.  
  
“What about you, Remus?” Lily asked. “We haven’t seen yours yet. What have you got? Something nice for a change, I hope?”  
  
With an unreadable expression, Remus turned his teacup so the rest of them could see its contents.  
  
“That’s…” Lily began, then didn’t seem to know how to continue. “I don’t know what to call that. Is that even a symbol?”  
  
In Remus’ cup, one single damp leaf lay curled, alone, near the bottom of the cup. The entire rest of the cup’s contents were clumped together on the other side of the cup, leaving that one leaf entirely separate.  
  
“That can’t be right,” James said. “How can you interpret that?”  
  
“It means loneliness,” Sirius said, though he didn’t want to. “Loss. Being left behind.”  
  
Remus looked up and met Sirius’ eyes. His face wore a look Sirius hadn’t seen in a long time, the same look Remus’ face had borne way back in the beginning, before they’d all become friends. A look that said he was meant to be alone, and he’d accepted it, because this was just how things would be.  
  
“I contest that,” Sirius said fiercely. He was gripping the edge of the table with both fists. “I don’t care if the tea leaves show real futures, I’ll fight it. If you’re ever left alone, Remus, I’ll find my way back to you.”  
  
Their eyes locked. Everything else in the hall fell away, even James and Lily and Peter. Sirius saw Remus understand something about him, Sirius, that maybe hadn’t been expressed quite so clearly before now. Then Remus nodded: a small, careful nod that meant maybe the same thing Sirius meant.  
  
Then Remus’ mouth quirked into half a smile, and the world around them returned. “Thanks, Padfoot. I won’t forget that.”  
  
James let out a huge, whooshing breath, as if he’d forgotten to exhale for a long time. “Divination’s a dodgy art, anyway,” he said. “You’ve all heard how McGonagall talks about it.”  
  
“And it’s like Sirius said,” Lily added. “Nearly everything is a portent of death, one way or another. You could go mad trying to avoid them all. Better to live now, right? Live our lives, instead of spending them obsessing about what’s to come.”  
  
James slipped an arm around Lily and she leaned into his shoulder.  
  
“I still want to pass my N.E.W.T., though,” Peter said.  
  
“Well, now we know,” Sirius said, and his voice came out only slightly shaky. “Just say you see death in everything, and you’ll probably be all right.”  
  
In the quiet of the mostly empty hall, that sentiment settled leadenly over the table.  
  
“Wait,” Remus said. “No.” He reached out and swept all five of their teacups together into one tightly clustered group at the centre of the table. “Divination is what the diviner makes of it, isn’t that what Professor McGonagall says? The meaning of a portent depends at least partly on the individual’s interpretation.”  
  
With slow and deliberate determination, Remus upended the teacups, one by one, so that the leaves they contained splattered out across the tabletop in a series of uneven blotches. They all stared at the lumpy mess Remus had made.  
  
“It looks kind of like a vine,” James observed at last. “Like ivy.”  
  
“For friendship and continuity,” Sirius translated, those old tomes of symbolism still lying open in his mind. He lifted his eyes from the leaves to Remus.  
  
Remus was looking back at him, as if waiting to see what Sirius would say.  
  
What Sirius said was, “Moony, why are you such a genius?”  
  
Because leave it to Remus to not only understand the worry they’d all caused themselves by taking the tea leaves so seriously, but also to find a way to take the matter back into their own hands and make their own meaning.  
  
A smile broke across Remus’ face. Like all of Remus’ smiles, it was a true, warm, unselfconscious smile, free of pretence, full of gladness. Remus’ smile was one of the few truly good things in the world, as far as Sirius was concerned, maybe the best thing of all. And Sirius loved making it appear.  
  
“Divination is what you make of it,” Lily said with a bit of a laugh in her voice. “I like it. And it’d work for the exam, too, Pete. What examiner could argue with that logic? You’ve immersed yourself so thoroughly in the study of this arcane art, internalised so deeply the complex logic of symbolic understanding, that you’ve reached a level where you trust no one’s interpretation but your own.”  
  
“That’s a portent I can get behind,” James said, still gazing at the array of tea leaves Remus had created on the table. “What else matters, as long as we’ve got us, together?” He looked around at each of them, his face lit up with all that James-earnestness that made him so absurd and so dear.  
  
“Yes,” Sirius agreed.  
  
“Yes,” Remus said. And he met Sirius’ eyes. And he smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> Here are my other Remus/Sirius stories:
> 
> • [On a Windswept Cliff](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2066574/chapters/4492539) – the Remus/Sirius gothic romance AU!  
> • [A Constellation’s Just a Picture in the Sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5268578/chapters/12157184) – a slight-canon-divergence AU of adventure and romance.  
> • [The Fall of the House of Black](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12462843) – another gothic romance, that's also a fusion with Edgar Allan Poe.  
> • [Northern Sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12526136) – Remus takes Sirius to watch the northern lights.  
> • [Dust and Soot and Silence](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2348966) – four nights of difficult emotions, in 1979.  
> • [Hangover Cures](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2642246) – fluff and romance, one morning ca. 1980.  
> • [Shipwreck Against Your Eyes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2642282) – things falling apart, in September 1981.  
> • [Never Say Never Never](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2707922) – fluff and fun and Muggle films, in 1977.  
> • [ Like Leaves and Kings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27342946) – the Marauders, on the cusp of adulthood, with just a touch of Remus/Sirius.  
> • [ The Loneliest Man of Winter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21947380) – Sirius never went to Azkaban.  
> • [ River, Sea and Stream](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22061827) – three moments.  
> • [ Bliss of the Domestic Kind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29568927) – a post-canon moment of happiness.  
> • [Boys in Space](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1736696) – a fun little outer space AU.  
> • and a fun co-written project with stereolightning: [Fantastic Beasts and How to Win Their Hearts: A Retelling of Beauty and the Beast](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4978381/chapters/11434138)


End file.
